Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra is proud to host the internationally acclaimed 2024 edition of their annual festival: GIOFest. This year sees GIOFest XVI, the16th incarnation of the event with a programme bringing together artists from around the world, presenting newly commissioned work created especially for GIO’s unique and diverse ensemble. Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra- one of the world’s leading large improvising ensembles- is the hub of a truly international community of musicians, reflected in the range of works they perform, and in their year -round programme of innovative collaborations with groups and artists from across the world. The festival will present a series of premieres and collaborations, exploring new possibilities for large ensemble performance, improvisation and composition.
We are delighted to welcome George Lewis, one of the most formidable figures in modern music: a composer of international renown, a legendary improvising trombonist, a computer-music pioneer, and a stalwart of the Black avant-garde collective known as the AACM: the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He is also the author of the definitive biography of the AACM, A Power Stronger than Itself. George is a longtime friend of GIO, and our work with him stretches back for nearly 20 years - this year he brings his new piece High Load, Low Road.
Douglas R. Ewart, perhaps best known as a composer, improviser, sculptor and maker of masks and instruments, Douglas is also an educator, lecturer, arts organization consultant and an all-around visionary. GIO first worked with Douglas at the Tectonics Festival in 2022 and he returns with a new piece for GIO: Concentric.
Musician, Performer, Teacher, Dancer, Composer, Actor, Activist, Maggie Nicols is one of the world’s most respected improvising vocalists - a “Singer of Songs & Sounds” with a lifetime of experience as performer, she will lead GIO in a new piece she has developed specially for the group. Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments in order to inspire audiences to reimagine how they experience contemporary music and sound. Described by The New Yorker as “America’s foremost new-music group”, The Ensemble creates a mosaic musical ecosystem honouring the diversity of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists. For the festival, GIO will be joined by New York’s ICE musicians Fay Victor, Clara Warnaar, Kyle Armbrust and Jonathan Finlayson
Surbhi Mittal, aka Pale Blue Dotter, is a sound artist, musician, and deep listening practitioner based in Delhi, India. She has developed a newly commissioned piece for GIO which will be premiered during the festival.
Painter, Sculptor and Filmmaker Mario Rossi studied sculpture at Glasgow’s School of Art. From 1979–81 he did a postgraduate sculpture course at Royal College of Art. He was Gulbenkian Scholar at the British School in Rome in 1982–3. Rossi was artist-in-residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1988–9. Although trained as a sculptor Rossi became well known as a painter, draughtsman and filmmaker, his work juxtaposing images from classical antiquity with those of contemporary life and society. He took part in many group shows and was featured in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s 1989–90 touring exhibition Scottish Art since 1900. That gallery holds his suite of nine drawings, Charms, Capillaries and Amulets: Suite No. 2, of 1987. In recent work there has been a focus on geopolitics, identity and migration. For the festival he has created a new film: Wild Track, which will be accompanied by the orchestra with a score directed by Gerry Rossi.
Improvisation as a way of imagining futures in music, participation & inclusion
Our discussion event will focus on imagining futures in music, participation, inclusion and the spaces in which these happen. We bring together five bold musical adventurers, whose collective expertise spans building machines and AI informed instruments that can improvise, to creating sonic spinning tops from bamboo. Each panelist is active in thinking about and making ways to create and collaborate using improvisation, in spaces from gym halls on the South Side of Chicago, to the Zoomesphere, and in classrooms, and concert halls. Panelists are Jessica Argo, Tia DeNora, Douglas R. Ewart, George E. Lewis and Maria Sappho.
